


Emotional Consequences of Metaphorical Necromancy

by boo_cool_robot



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s02e06 Epidemiology, Episode: s06e13 Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television, M/M, Meta, Missing Scene, break-it, there we go, what's the opposite of a fix-it?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28413126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boo_cool_robot/pseuds/boo_cool_robot
Summary: Jeff covers his face with his hands and sighs. “I’m casting us in a moody gay indie drama as a way of avoiding my existential anxiety about everyone leaving, aren’t I?”“Happens to the best of us.”
Relationships: Abed Nadir/Jeff Winger, Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	Emotional Consequences of Metaphorical Necromancy

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! My second Community fic is basically the opposite of the first.This one is angsty, in an experimental format for me, and the Jeff/Abed pairing is not all that happy. Also, Troy/Abed doesn't get explicitly discussed so much as it is the horizon that forms the foreground of this whole thing. There are oblique spoilers for the finale.
> 
> Also also, and I'm very sorry about this, there are NBC Hannibal spoilers in the endnotes.

Jeff’s hands are on Abed’s throat. His fingers tighten, framed between a crooked flannel collar and Abed’s jaw, and then loosen. Abed’s hands hover in space, carefully touching nothing at all.

Sound trickles in. Gradually, the sound of hard breaths and slick kissing noises becomes audible.

“Oh...hi.” Jeff pulls back from the kiss, the heat of Abed’s skin still hovering next to his. He gives a him a grin. Abed’s face is near-bisected by a square of yellow falling on it, the light from another room. He thinks about putting his hand in his, and then doesn’t.

Abed cocks his head. “Hello.” He gives a decisive little nod, straightens his collar. 

“God, I’ve never felt like this before,” Jeff half-laughs. He tries to spread his hands in a gesture that encompasses the blooming of new self-knowledge, the rhythmic vitality of discovering a new lease on life. Abed blinks. 

“Oh, that’s where you’re going with this?” 

Abed doesn’t elaborate. There is a long silence. Jeff feels his stomach tighten. 

He brings their mouths together again, harder, laying one of his hands on Abed’s cheek and clutching his collar with the other. Abed kisses back, and then he doesn’t. Just stays there and lets Jeff kiss him. 

Jeff pulls back again. “Usually the ladies are more enthusiastic about this,” he smirks. He’s sure the angle he’s holding his chin at is very charming. 

“Sure they were,” Abed shrugs, no charmedness registering in his steady gaze. “You were the leading man, after all.”

Jeff’s smirk drops off his face. Abed doesn’t seem inclined to explain, or to resume kissing him, or to interlace their fingers and lead him into a sensual new world. The pit in Jeff’s stomach hardens. 

“Now what?” Jeff asks. It’s the kind of murmuring question that can barely be heard over a soundtrack, that’s pitched and paced to sound like a confession. He touches his fingertips to Abed’s cheekbone.

Abed shrugs again. “This is your pitch.” He forms a square with his long fingers, places it in front of his eye in a mirror of Jeff. “But I would recommend moving on from the whole thing where I’m a manic pixie dream boy shocking you into a midlife bisexuality revelation that gives you a new angle on life.” 

Jeff covers his face with his hands and sighs. “I’m casting us in a moody gay indie drama as a way of avoiding my existential anxiety about everyone leaving, aren’t I?” 

“Happens to the best of us.”

“This is my pitch... “ Jeff lets his shoulders minutely slump against the wall. 

“I just said that.” Abed’s mouth quirks, half-visible in the gap between Jeff’s fingers. “But I understand that slow-paced dialogue where the characters don’t really say anything interspersed with long shots of their microexpressions is important to the atmosphere of gay indie films.” 

Jeff grasps at all his knowledge about gay characters, figures slipping through his head like water. “Well, maybe now that you’ve said that we can switch to being the ambiguously gay pair who comment on all the straight drama happening around them.” He drops his hands from his face and practices raising an eyebrow puckishly. 

Abed sighs. “You already gave us a makeout scene. If we were being the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we wouldn’t have had a makeout scene where you could hear wet noises.” 

“So being the sexless interracial gay dads of a more important character is also out then?”

“That, plus the reasons why involving a kid would be a losing maneuver were covered in the last pitch.” Abed fingerguns. It looks menacing in the low light. A level horizon could be drawn from his fingertips to Jeff’s heart, or near enough. Jeff knows now that he’s only watching the lines of Abed’s body and thinking about metaphors in the framing because they haven’t quite slipped out of the genre this pitch started in, but he needs this to keep going.

He holds the frames in his mind. Abed’s fingers fold back into loose fists slowly, delicately, and then move to straighten his flannel once again. A shift of his body away from Jeff’s.

“Wait!” Jeff holds his own fingers to his mouth, the kind of gesture that’s half campy and half striking in its vulnerability on a man, he tells himself. “Where are you going?” 

Abed cocks his head. “The conceit seems to have been taken as far as it’ll go. We’re at an unsustainable level of meta, and the audience is likely to find the contrasting narration and dialogue styles grating the longer it goes on, so I’m ending the scene before that can happen.” 

“We could sleep together!” Jeff near-shouts. It would bring the genre back on track, bring Abed back to being pressed along his front.

“We could.” Abed seems neither enthused nor repulsed at the concept. His gaze shifts slightly, glinting from clinical remove to something harder. “We could sleep together, and then one of us would leave anyway. That’s how the story always ends.” His fingers tighten minutely at his collar.

He had frozen in place for their exchange, his fingers still at his throat. It’s near cartoonish, everything about his body in arrested motion exaggerated. He stands in half-light, Jeff in shadow, their postures near-mirrored. 

“Yeah, that’s because I remind you of you, but with potential,” Abed says. “That’s the whole thematic framing of this scene. And now that I’ve drawn attention to that, this pitch is definitely played out. It would have never carried a whole seventh season.” 

His palms press together, hands parallel to the floor. Like a gate being slipped through, they hinge open at the wrists, and then clap together again. An inverted clapperboard. _Finis_.

Cool-toned guitars and indie-scratchy vocals begin to play. Jeff tries not to hear them. Jeff tries not to see how Abed’s back rises in the frame as he walks up the stairs that lead out of the room. Jeff tries not to be the opening scene of a montage that will carry Abed and Abed alone somewhere else, far away from here. 

_Where is your sense of indignation,_ says the song. 

“Abed!” He can hear desperation in his voice now, a bad sign. He knows from the seasons up until now that a witness to desperation will laugh to distance themselves from their own yawning wants. Showing desperation is the beginning of a joke. _It is the nature of the business._ “I love you.”

Abed doesn’t pause. “You didn’t even try to imagine what I’d get out of this pitch. You just described my hands a lot.” 

“Fine!” His desperate voice breaks. “Fine. All my ideas for gay shows are terrible, and I don’t love you. I just hate myself, okay?” 

Abed finally turns around. For a moment, Jeff sees himself from the camera’s point of view, how he looks left standing at the bottom of the library stairs. He’s tiny and off-center in the frame, at the edge of a pool of receding light. Frightened-looking, like something with bared teeth is closing in on him. 

Abed’s gaze is far away, like he’s already watching a different scene.

“I know,” Abed says. 

He cuts the lights on his way out. 

**Author's Note:**

> And now a non-canon tag for my own fic:
> 
> “Well, speaking of midlife bisexuality revelations and slow-paced dialogue where the characters don’t really say anything interspersed with long shots of their microexpressions...maybe I could just hang out here, like in a really well-appointed and luxurious cell and make a lot of innuendo. And you could come visit me when you need my help to solve a murder? We can work up to hugging and slow-mo killing someone.” 
> 
> Abed gives him a look of pure disgust. “Don’t reference that show to me, Jeff.”
> 
> \---  
> The song is the Magnetic Fields' "No One Will Ever Love You." (If anyone is wondering, the inclusion of its lyrics, as well as this fic's title, are actually from Abed's point of view.)
> 
> Thanks for reading! Like I said, his one was an experiment, and it was cool to play around with this dynamic and format. 
> 
> Catch me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/boo_cool_robot) or [Tumblr](https://soundingonlyatnightasyousleep.tumblr.com/) for my occasional Communityposting.


End file.
